The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

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СКАЧАТЬ the eyes looking into his. The make-up was still there. The reddened lids, the watery effect, but there was in them now the look of the captain on the bridge taking over command when dirty weather is expected.

      And Thornton's face, too, though he was unaware of the fact, had altered. There was a hint of pallor in it of stress around the mobile mouth that was carefully noted. It was not more than might have been expected under the circumstances, but it was not less.

      "I suppose you couldn't tell me if you have found anything that looks like foul play?" Thornton's eyes were more veiled than usual as he put the question.

      Apparently the man beside him could not.

      "What did kill her?" Thornton asked after a futile wait.

      "A fall."

      "You think she was flung into that sand pit, then?"

      "Well, she was found there, wasn't she?" Thornton thought that it would be hard to imagine a more inane reply.

      "Now, sir, I shall walk back along this short cut," Brown went on in a whisper. "May I ask you a few more questions at your cottage presently?"

      "Certainly. I am quite at your service. Of course you must let me put you up."

      Brown thanked him, and then shambled slowly back beside the marks of Rose's shoes. His eyes were now on them, now searching the trees in sight. Here and there he saw patches of snowy blackthorn, but the trees were never where they could have played a part in the mysterious death that he was studying. Yet Rose Charteris's hands had grasped their leaves as she fell. Fell whence? Fell where?

      Back at Stillwater he turned into the grounds and walked slowly through them. He came to a halt not far from Thornton's cottage, facing the lake that gave the house its name, and which now marked one boundary of Colonel Scarlett's grounds. An Italian summer house stood at one end, so surrounded by evergreens that it was hidden alike from house and cottages. Its two stories ended in a waist-high railing which marked out half the flat roof into a square, with high corner posts crowned with flowers. The railing was green. So was an outside stair that ran from the ground to the little Lookout, as Pointer learnt later that the roof was called.

      Around the summer house ran a row of flower-pots set on a broad band of red tiles. There were four doors, each marked by a tree. On the side farthest from the house lay a pile of cut boughs beside one of these little sentinels.

      The tree, a blackthorn, had been lopped back almost to a pole.

      Pointer hurriedly lifted the snowy branches one by one. Those underneath had been badly broken, as though by some heavy object falling through them. He ran up the outside stairs. The railing was being repainted, and repainted green. The same coloured green as the faint smear that he had just seen on Rose Charteris's sleeve. It was still tacky. On one side, the side above the cut boughs, were three dull smudges. A broad smudge the length of his span, and two smaller ones, well to one side. All three showed a sort of turning movement.

      He looked very closely at them. The two smaller ones he took to be hand grips, though they showed no definite fingerprints. The turning movements of whoever had gripped the rail to look down on the flagging below had been too strong for that.

      All three marks had been made before last night's rain, and judging by their looks at about the same time. The balustrade was still bordered with a fringe of tiny drops.

      The broad one corresponded in length and height from the flat roof top, with the missing strip on the back of the dead girl's frock. The balustrade was not a broad one, but Pointer thought that the greater width of the cut-out oblong had been caused by a rotary movement on the paint.

      That would mean that she had been flung over backwards. And those hand-grips—they might well be those of the murderer peering down at the lifeless body of his victim. They were not made by Rose, and he thought not made by any woman, Rose had exceptionally slender hands.

      He knew now where Rose Charteris had met her death. He believed that he was standing on the very spot.

      The line of clues had been so straight that he hoped for a short, clear case which would be over in a couple of days. It had begun like that, but a few minutes later he saw that it was not going on like that. Not at all. Pointer always considered the Rose Charteris murder as puzzling a problem as any that he had ever tackled.

      He made his way through a gate close by to the short cut again, and traced those shoe-prints, that corresponded exactly to the two outlines which he had in his pocket, back to the sand-pit.

      The marks were deep and clear. They must have been made when the sandy path before him was soft and yielding, but not sloppy after the rain. Their edges were far too sharp and definite for them to have been washed by such a flood as that of last night.

      But Rose Charteris's dress, her hair, her shoes—but not her hat—were wringing wet. There was no water in the sand-pit; its sides had been too deep to let the very slanting downpour strike in hard. Nor would any pool there have explained the fact that though her clothes and hair were soaked through on top, they were merely damp beneath her. No. Rose must have lain out in that hard rain from start to finish. Lain in all likelihood where she struck the flagging. That meant that these shoe-prints were made some hours after Rose herself had taken her last steps.

      Pointer remembered the hasty bows on the shoes. Both tied to the same side. The rain, as he had ascertained from the meteorological expert at the Yard, had come down in this part of England at half-past ten, almost to the second, and lasted just twenty minutes.

      That being so, he decided that the prints before him had been made somewhere around one o'clock in the morning.

      He took some casts with stearine powder and some careful photographs with his tiny camera, that photographed vertically downwards.

      The steps were those of a woman light in weight walking slowly, and balancing herself very strangely. At one moment her weight was on her right foot. At the next it would be on her left. Sometimes a step backwards had been taken, sometimes the forward step checked halfway. She was a young woman with a springy gait. He judged, though, that the shoes were too big for her. Now Rose had small feet for her height, so whoever had taken her place would be shorter than she, or much smaller-boned, slighter built. But the gait! The strange, halting, pressing gait! Lurching at times... the word was the key he needed. On the instant he guessed the reason, for this was no drunken woman's purposeless perambulation. The woman who wore the shoes of the dead girl was not carrying a load, but she was steadying one.

      Pointer studied the ground like a bushman. He found a mark such as he was looking for, first on one side of the path, and then—in one other place—on the other side. Such a mark as a hard-tyred bicycle would make But it did not cross the path He made quite sure of that He deduced something like two hard-tyred bicycles with a space between. Possibly a plank had been lashed to them, the body of the dead girl placed on this, and wheeled to the pit.

      But this did not explain the fact that though some of the prints showed the woman as steadying she was never pushing a weight. She was keeping something true, but she was not using force. Evidently some one else had done the pushing or drawing, her task merely being to see that no wheel ran on the sandy path where Rose Charteris's were to be the only marks left behind. All other footprints had come much later, when the path was far dryer, or else had been pounded flat by the rain previously.

      Under the trees in the copse, Pointer read some more of the cryptogram which every crime leaves behind it.

      He saw now СКАЧАТЬ